WWE: 5 Best Matches Ever To Take Place On UK Soil

2. John Cena vs. Shawn Michaels - WWE Monday Night Raw, 23rd April 2007

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8p9IBITM6I It is not very often that WWE's weekly television show, Monday Night Raw, produces a match that will still be talked about for years to come. Those matches are usually saved for the pay-per-view events. In April 2007, however, John Cena and Shawn Michaels put on a rare example. The match took place just a few weeks after these two men faced off at WrestleMania 23; a great match in its own right. Prior to that meeting, John Cena and Shawn Michaels had been the WWE Tag Team Champions. With John Cena emerging victorious at WrestleMania, and a Fatal Four Way match set for Backlash, Shawn Michaels wanted another chance to prove that he could beat John Cena one-on-one. The two men wrestled for 57 minutes in total, a staggering achievement at a time when hour-long matches are incredibly rare. In fact, they are almost exclusively saved for Iron Man matches, which the competitors have weeks to prepare for. It is hard to do justice to this match in written form. Many have called it the greatest match in the history of Monday Night Raw. In the end, Shawn Michaels gained revenge for WrestleMania to set the scene perfectly for the upcoming match at Backlash. As a stand-alone match, with no backstory, this match would still be an excellent encounter and a match of the year contender in any calendar year. What makes this match even more special though, is the way it challenged two common misconceptions from the time. The first idea challenged was the idea, primarily put forward by internet fans, that John Cena cannot wrestle. Here, he clearly proved to the world that he was more than capable. Secondly, it challenged the idea that modern wrestling audiences do not have the patience to sit through long matches. The crowd in attendance at Earls Cout in London loved every second of this hour-long classic.